Liberal Conservative Flip Flop

Here’s a video where a conservative defends a big-government welfare-based government monopoly, and a liberal puts forth alternative free market solutions.

The liberal talks about Latinx and Trans people and other liberal buzz words, which rubs me the wrong way. The conservative shows such little respect for liberty and justice. No wonder we’re in such a mess.

Here’s my response to the video:

I don’t think this guy has ever thought critically about the police for a single millisecond. It is rare for police to ever stop a crime in progress. So police aren’t for protection. In fact, they aren’t even legally obligated to protect you. Ideally speaking, they are there to find criminals after they’ve committed the crime and bring them to justice. Their other purpose, which never comes up in government PR, is that police are there to collect taxes.

Even in cases like terrorist shootings that he mentions, police rarely protect anyone. At Columbine, police hid outside in fear, even after the shooters killed themselves. The conservative never explains why hundreds of thousands of cops across the country are necessary for a couple of shootings a year. Why can’t citizens with an AR-15 respond to situations like that? They couldn’t do much worse than the cops.

He then talks about a lady being murdered and trying to call 911, and being told there are no police. Again, it’s rare for police to show up to prevent a crime in progress, so the whole thing is just a fantasy. Wouldn’t a better solution be to have an app on your phone that you can alert your neighbors that you need help. And wouldn’t it be nice for the men in the neighborhood to be men and show up to help to show that they love someone enough to potentially lay down their lives for someone else? We don’t have to do that, because we pay the government to do it.

The conservative then raises the question of how we could deal with situations like shoplifting. Maybe the same way the founding fathers dealt with crime before police, when we were still a free people. The police take the information from the store, and then try to locate the suspect. That doesn’t have to be done by police. That can be done privately by investigators, bounty hunters and the courts, which is how early America did it. Read this excellent article on that history.

Then, the liberal says that the job of cops is to manufacture criminals. I think that isn’t the day-to-day mindset of the cop on the street, but I think that is true. With the tough-on-crime mentality of the latter half of the 1900s, politicians made a lot of things illegal that weren’t illegal, and increased prison sentences dramatically. I’ve also heard that there are district attorneys offices whose budgets are wildly too big with a lot of extra staff. What does a prosecuting attorney with nothing to do start looking for? What will happen when we start putting cops in every junior high and high school? You’re going to get more criminals. There have been cases where private prisons bribe judges to send them inmates. This is not far fetched, and the conservative is just not well informed. It’s not exactly surprising that cops aren’t told this, or that this isn’t in the government PR message.

Then the conservative mocks the idea of policing for profit, and says that cops only make $30,000 per year. I suppose there are some places where cops aren’t well paid, but there are also cops who are making great money, and even have pensions worth a couple million. Check out this Forbes story on that.

And the conservative makes fun of the idea that poorly-paid cops are going around trying to put money in other people’s pocket. Well feast your eyes on the video below. Oftentimes they’re trying to put money in their own pocket, as has been verified in local newspapers over the last week or so.

He then goes on to say that cops need to be one step ahead of criminals as far as militarization goes. Criminals have an AR-15 so why go against them with a pistol? The whole point of the 2nd Amendment is that the people are to be as well-armed as the government.

The people are paying the police to protect the citizens, but the police seem much more concerned about their own safety than those they’re paid to protect.

The liberal makes a great point that to end police, their budgets need to be cut. The conservative says that budgets are too small as it is, and for more training, they need more money. That is crazy as far as I’m concerned. When you see 6 or 10 or 15 cops show up to a simple call, it seems like the best thing to do is lay off about 90% of cops. When I’ve had the cops called on me for doing perfectly legal evangelism on a public street, 8 cops showed up. They must have been bored stiff that night.

Starting around 5:15 to 5:53, he then makes a point that I think is important. He says that all shootings are different and have different policies, training, etc. This is something that I’ve been harping on for a long time. Arizona defines murder in a different way than Indiana, which is different from Mississippi. Is it the government’s job to define murder. I have a Christian friend who said officers were justified in one particular incident, and he appealed to state law. Ok, Christian, if you allow the state to define murder, abortion is perfectly legitimate, because the state says so. God defines murder, and every cop who kills someone will stand before God and be judged by His clear and precise law. God will not judge anyone based on Colorado law.

He then mocks the liberal idea of rapid response justice teams saying that cops are that system. But that presupposes that cops bring justice, and the government isn’t stealing to fund their very existence. But he’s clearly someone who hasn’t thought about this stuff very much and seems to worship government power. Here is where he most blatantly shows that he’s a big-government conservative, and cares not a wit about free-market solutions, but in forcing his chosen solution on everyone based on force.

And he thinks the state-sanctioned rapid response justice team is automatically better than the free market rapid response justice team. It’s like he thinks the government people are magical, and this service is only possible through the power of the state. I think a lot of the same people would be involved in the free market security service, except that they could much more easily be held accountable.

So that is it. I’ve debated many people on this, and I never get rational arguments. All they have to offer is emotions.

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